Bangalore, India (SPX) May 1, 2006 - ISRO is looking to jump-start an Indiansatellite industry by inviting prospective domestic contractors to work with theagency until they can develop independent manufacturing capabilities.

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"After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined, and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft."

Very nice description of Chandrayaan's science payload at http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2006/pdf/1704.pdf . Looks well-designed -- if Japan's Selene-1 fails, this one will make a good backup. (Note, by the way, that it carries THREE separate near-IR spectrometers.)

A very interesting project since it is the Indian's lunar spacecraft mission. India has already developed many spacecraft, all of them for telecomunications, science and meteorological purposes around the Earth. India has own rocket technology which is based of cyrogenic liquid.

The spacecraft will be launched on a PSLV C5 (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota on the southeast coast of India in September of 2007 at the earliest. The PSLV will inject Chandrayaan-1 into a 240 x 36000 km geosynchronous transfer orbit. After a 5.5 day lunar transfer trajectory the spacecraft will be captured into an initial 1000 km near circular orbit which will be lowered to a 200 km checkout orbit and finally into a 100 km circular polar orbit. It will stay in orbit and return data for at least two years. Chandrayaan is Hindi for "Moon Craft". Total cost of the mission is about $100 million U.S.

The price tag of the Chandrayaan-1 is not cheap and it sounds about right. It will bring many scientific instruments.

Hope it will success since it is labeled as a high risk project since it is the first project ones.

"NASA will have two scientific instruments on India's maiden voyage to the moon.

Tuesday, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and his counterpart, Indian Space Research Organization Chairman G. Madhavan Nair, signed two Memoranda of Understanding in Bangalore, India, for cooperation on India's Chandrayaan-1 mission."

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"After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined, and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft."

Discussing the aforesaid programme of ISRO, chairman PRI council, ISRO-DOS, Prof UR Rao said: "The mission aims to search for surface or sub-surface water-ice on the moon, specially at the lunar pole and to carry out high resolution mapping of topographic features in 3D. It would also look into the mineral composition of the moon." Rao, who is also Chancellor of Ambedkar University, was in the city on Tuesday.

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"After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined, and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft."

India's first mission to moon 'Chandrayaan I' this year, manned mission to earth's satellite in 2014, landing on Mars in 2020 and perhaps colonisation of the red planet later. That's Indian space think tank's list of missions for the future. ..

"The day time temperatures are about 20 degrees Celsius though night time temperatures are low. We should be able to build an atmosphere without much problem. Then, we could send half our population there," said Physical Research Laboratory council chairman and former Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) chief

I just finished doing some quick little animations for the C1XS team. It's not a great 3d model of Chandrayaan-1 (it was quite hard to get good details) but the X-Ray spectrometer looks good thanks to help from RAL. It's a bit annoying that the quality of bump maps/textures for the moon is much worse than for Mars - we need this flotilla (Kaguya, Chang-e 1, Chandrayaan-1 and LRO ) to do their thing before we can have realistic data to make better animations . Meanwhile -a few stills attached, I'll leave it up to the C1XS team to release the finished thing. No - it's not vacuuming up skittles....those are Xrays silly

It should make it on ESA's coverage of the launch ( they are involved with C1XS ), the C1XS website, and maybe the national media here in the UK will pick it up as well

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